China Names New U.s. Envoy

April 22, 1985|The New York Times

PEKING — China announced Sunday that Han Xu, a deputy foreign minister who was a close aide to Premier Zhou Enlai, will become its ambassador to the United States.

The appointment, expected for several months, was confirmed in a dispatch by the official New China News Agency. Western diplomats hailed the appointment as a signal by China`s leaders that improving relations with the United States remains a high priority, not to be downgraded because of Peking`s enhanced efforts in recent months to improve ties with the Soviet Union.

The significance of the appointment was underlined by the attention the news agency gave it. Ambassadorial appointments commonly rate a few terse lines, as was the case when Peking changed its envoy in Moscow earlier this year. In Han`s case, the agency quotdd at length from an interview with the new ambassador to be published in an upcoming issue of Outlook, a Chinese political journal.

Han, in his late 50s, was quoted as saying that despite difficulties in relations between Washington and Peking, notably over Taiwan, ``no serious unpleasant incidents have occurred in the last year.``